Performance by Country helps you understand how traffic from different countries is contributing to your overall ad revenue. Use this to make decisions about where to focus your efforts for creating and promoting content.
Where a reader is located when they visit your site is an important factor in how valuable that session or pageview is to an advertiser and how much they’re willing to pay for it (CPM), which in turn determines your RPM.
Understanding Performance by Country
Overall, readers in the United States are the most valuable audience to many advertisers, with other English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia falling into the next most valuable audience.
GDPR can affect CPM for certain countries
In countries governed by GDPR, readers must first consent to receive personalized advertising, which is largely how advertisers learn whether or not they’re the right audience for their ads. If the reader doesn’t consent, only non-personalized ads will show, which pay much less. How many of your readers choose to allow personalized advertising affects your CPM for these countries.
Sanctions and restrictions can affect CPM for certain countries
There are some countries where ads won’t serve or advertisers don’t spend money due to sanctions or other government restrictions.
Advertiser interest can affect CPM for certain countries
In many countries, advertisers don’t have a need to reach a particular audience there, so they spend money for that traffic much more infrequently.
As a result, your percentage of traffic from the United States is a major contributor to your sitewide RPM. But more traffic is more traffic—you’re usually still making more money overall by bringing in traffic from other countries, even if it shifts your site’s overall RPM.
Not seeing all your data in Performance by Country?
In some cases, Google Signals settings can impact the GA4 data in your Raptive dashboard, which is particularly noticeable in the new Performance by Country report. When Google Signals is on, the way that Google Analytics sets data thresholds limits our access to some of the data needed for these granular reports.
We recommend turning Google Signals off for now if you want accurate data in Performance by Country. You can do this from the Admin section of your GA4 property.
Go to Admin > Property settings > Data collection and modification > Data collection and toggle the "Google signals data collection" toggle to the left so that there isn't a checkmark. It may take a couple of days to reflect in your dashboard, but you should start to see more granular country data soon!